806: 15 Transactions for Week 4

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Speaker 1: This is the Lady Podcast with your host JJ zacher Retha j je zacher reson. What's up everyone, It's JJ Zacharyeson in this episode eight hundred and six of the Late Round Fantasy Football Podcast sponsored by FanDuel. Thanks for tuning in. Before we getting this week's transactions, I wanted to direct all of you to the Late Round Fantasy Football social channels. There's a YouTube channel that has clips from a lot of the shows that I do. There's an Instagram account at Late Round FF where I'm posting data every single day. There's even a TikTok account. Just search Late Round Fantasy Football and you should find what you're looking for. Now, let's get to these transactions. Add to von a Chain, so we all know what Devon A Chain did in Week three. He scored fifty one point three PPR points. It was just the fourth time that a running back scored fifty points since twenty sixteen, and he did it with a forty three percent running back rush air in a fourteen percent target hair. Now, the reason a Chain was a player to target in the Late Round draft guy this offseason and why he was something I featured on this show before Week one was because he's quite literally the perfect fit for this offense. We'd seen smaller speedy backs thrive in this system in the past, whether it be Elijah Mitchell or Raheem Mostard, and a Chain was a better prospect than those guys. And then on top of that, he was in an ambiguous backfield and he was a rookie. Those are the things that I'm always looking for. But I wasn't expecting this. Of course, I wasn't expecting this. Now. The Dolphins aren't gonna be playing the Broncos every week. The Broncos defense has been atrocious to start the year. But there's no chance Miami now just lets Devon a Chain sit on the bench. Even if and when Jeff Wilson is back, is he gonna hit eighteen carries a game? Probably not. Like I said, he had a forty three percent running back rushhare. That's rarely gonna equate to eighteen rushes. And he's also an undersized back. He's not someone who profiles like a Sakuon Barkley. He's not gonna see that kind of workload. But ten carries a game, twelve carries a game, those are realistic expectations. For devon a chain week in and week out, and given his speed, and given his ability, and given his fit in this offense, ten to twelve touches on the ground and a handful of targets can go a long way. Now, hopefully you already have him on your roster, but if he's on your waiver wire, he's available in fifty nine percent of Yahoo League. Still, if he's on your waiver wire, it's time to break the bank. This is why we don't let go of rookies after just a couple of weeks. Hold Zach Sharbonet. Now, speaking of rookie running backs, Zach Sharbonet, he's kind of been disappointing to start the year. But right now, after week three, this is not the time to give up. Kenneth Walker is the dude in that offense. There's no doubt he's the one that you want in fantasy football. But that backfield split has gradually changed over the first three weeks the season. In Week one, Sharponnay played twenty four percent of Seattle snaps. That moved up to twenty eight percent in week two. This past week it was forty four percent, and Sharpenay looked good against Carolina in Week three, he had a sixty seven percent success rate, while Walker had a fifty six percent success rate. That's according to next Gen Stats. What this is telling me is that in positive game script environments, sharbon Ay could be useful in fantasy football. And then there's the obvious upside if an injury occurs to Kenneth Walker, this is the exact type of upside player that you should have on your bench. Add Quinton Johnston and Josh Palmer. Mike Williams has done for the year with a knee injury. That's going to change the way the Chargers deploy their wide receivers. After three games, Keenan Allen has run the most routes on this team is a one hundred and twenty two of them. Josh Palmer is at eighty eight. Quinton Johnston, their first round rookie, is at just thirty six. Johnson's run fewer routes than Gerald Everett, Joshua Kelly, and Donald Parham. So with Mike Williams out, we should expect Johnston to see an uptick and routes He's gonna play more Now on the season, the Chargers rank in the top half of the league in percentage of plays run out of eleven personnel, it's three wide receiver sets, so Johnson's gonna be on the field a lot more. The problem is that Palmer is clearly ahead of Johnston. So if you're looking for immediate production off the waiver wire, I think Palmer is probably your choice. Last season without Mike Williams, he saw about a twenty three percent target share. But if you're fine withholding a higher variance player, which is what Quinton Johnston is, then maybe Johnston's the direction you want to go in. We've already seen Josh Palmer be just a solid wide receiver. The upside is still with Johnston, largely due to ambiguity. Don't get me wrong, I did think Johnson was a better prospect than Josh Palmer, but the lack of playing time for Johnston is somewhat of a concern. I talked about that last week on the show, and he was a very volatile prospect. But my stance overall is that if you're picking someone up to stash them, Johnston might be the play. If you need someone for immediate production, Josh Palmer's the play sell Damian Pierce, So the Texans saw negative game script in Week one and week two that led to Damian Pierce not seeing great snap rates. He had a forty six percent snap rate in Week one and then a forty nine percent snap rate in week two. In Week three, Houston had a nice game, They had a positive game flow for that offense. Even still, Pierce only had a fifty four percent snap share. Now, I understand the Texans were leading by a huge margin in that game and in the fourth quarter they used Mike and Devin Singletary a lot. They outsnap Pierce in the fourth quarter. But what this tells me is that Pierce isn't even the automatic closer for that team. And once again in Week three, he was in the team's primary pass catcher out of the backfield. Singletary ran more routes than Pierce for a second consecutive week. And then on top of all of that, the Texans offensive line is a mess that's led to inefficiency on the ground. So we're looking at the following. The Texans aren't using Damian Pierce as a bell coow in polar opposite game scripts, He's still not been a dominant force in that offense. I think he's the most talented back that they have, but they're not using him as a Bell Coow. But he found the end zone in week three. He ended the day as a solid RB two in fantasy, So there could be an opportunity to sell high, and I think he is a sell high candidate because I'm not sure this role is gonna change given the evidence we have right now. He's not looking like a bellcow running back here in two twenty three by Ramandre Stevenson. So a lot of fantasy managers are gonna look at that box score between the Jets and the Patriots this past weekend and they're gonna think this Patriots backfield is gonna be split moving forward. That it's gonna be a headache to figure out because in week three, Ezekiel Elliott saw sixteen rush attempts, Romandre Stevenson had nineteen. Ezekiel Elliott had eighty yards rushing. Stevenson had fifty nine. So a lot of people are gonna look at that and say Elliott was the better player on the ground in week three, Why aren't they just gonna give him more and more work. Here's the thing, here's my breakdown of it. If you have Stevenson, I wouldn't be overly concerned. Elliott saw nine of his sixteen rush attempts in the fourth quarter, that's when the Patriots were trying to close out that game. In the end, Stevenson still had nineteen routes to Elliott six. He was on the field for sixty five percent of New England's offensive snaps. That's the difference between someone like Ramandre Stevenson to someone like Damian Pierce, who I just talked about now. His sixty five percent snapshare was lower than what he saw in Week one and week two, where he was at seventy four percent and seventy two percent, but it wasn't that far off. Stevenson's workload didn't look great compared to Ezekiel Elliott, but he was still playing a large number of their snaps. And if you look at the Patriots' schedule moving forward, it's not as kind as their matchup against Zach Wilson. They get the Cowboys, Saints, Raiders, Bills, and Dolphins over their next five If this Patriots offense is trailing, Ezekiel Elliott is not the running back that's going to be on the field. Ramandre Stevenson is he's the one who's catching passes out of the backfield. So if someone's worried about Stevenson, now could be a nice by low moment for him. Add Marvin Mims. So this type of transaction, it's almost the inverse of what I typically say. I'm usually focused on peripherals, I'm focused on usage. Those things lead to production. So a lot of times I'm talking about by low candidates or players to add off the waiver wire when their production hasn't matched their peripherals, when their peripherals look great but the production maybe not so much. But in the case of Marvin Mims, his peripherals, his usage, they suck. It's his production that's been good. Through three games, Mims has run just twenty six routes, but on those twenty six routes, he's at one hundred and ninety five receiving yards. He leads the league with a seven and a half yards per route run rate. That's not going to continue, but it's awesome. So he's shown off that big playability to start the season. He's a good wide receiver. He was a good prospect. It's why I talked about him pre Week one. It's only a matter of time before he sees more snaps in this offense. DJ Moore, I really wanted the Bears to show us something in Week three. They had a decent enough matchup from a fantasy perspective against the Chiefs. I just wanted to see something. But they ended up having just a little over two hundred total net yards. They were horrible. Justin Fields is now averaging a Desmond Ridder like one hundred and seventy five passing yards per game. Everyone in that offense is suffering as a result, except for DJ Moore. He's actually been okay in fantasy, partially because he got bailed out with a late touchdown against the Chiefs. But he scored sixteen point four and thirteen point one PPR points over his last two and during that time he has a twenty seven and a half percent target chair per game. Those peripherals are not bad. It's just hard to trust those peripherals in this offense because after three weeks they ran thirty first and adjusted completion rate thirtieth and pressure rate allowed, and twenty eighth in passing volume. I don't think DJ Moore is going to be completely unusable moving forward. He's a good wide receiver, but I understand if you don't want to deal with us anymore. They do have a favorable matchup against the Broncos next week, but it's really really hard to buy into this offense right now, whether it's the coaching or whether it's justin Fields himself. So it's totally reasonable if you want to sell DJ Moore ad Wandel Robinson. I think one of the sneakier low key ads this week could be Wandel Robinson. He returned in Week three from that acl that he suffered in twenty twenty two. During his rookie year, he kind of picked up where he left off. The Giants only let him run eight routes, but he saw five targets on those routes. That type of targets per route run rate, that's a continuation of what we saw from Robinson last year. Among all wine outs with one hundred and more routes run last season, Robinson's rate of seeing targets ranked in the eighty seven percentile, and he was a rookie. He's a talented player. His role should grow as the season moves on, so it's not a bad idea to get him right now rather than waiting for that production to match by Jordan Addison. So prior to Monday Night Football, no team in the league has more pass attempts than the Minnesota Vikings, and that's what we saw last year. They were third in the NFL last season in pass attempts. That's huge for the team's pass catchers. Justin Jefferson, he's going to dominate TJ. Howkinson. He's going to see a lot of looks too. But even the secondary players like Jordan Adison and kJ Osbourne, they can be relevant as well. But the reason I'm calling Addison out here is because he's still playing behind the aforementioned Osbourne. Addison's run twenty seven fewer routes than Osbourne this year, but he has four more catches and eighty four more receiving yards. His yards per route run is one point seven to one, which is a really solid number, especially for a rookie. kJ Osbourne's point seventy five. That number would have ranked in the twelfth percentile at wide receiver last year. So it's only a matter of time before Addison leap frogs Osbourne. He's gonna become the number two wide receiver on this team because he's more talented than kJ Osbourne's and when that happens, when Addison becomes the number two, he's gonna be playing more snaps and he's gonna be running more routes. That's gonna lead to more fantasy production and Taj Spears. So we've now seen Taj Spears out snap Derreck Henry in two of three games this year, and he's also run eight more routes. That's led to target chairs of twelve point one percent, eight point three percent, and sixteen point seven percent across his first three games. In PPR formats, Spears has a chance to be usable without a Derrick Henry injury, and then it'll definitely be the case in more negative game script environments, which they could face over the next few weeks because they get the Bengals and Ravens upcoming, and then Spears obviously has that upside if Derrick Henry gets hurt and Henry's already dealing with a toe injury. Is available in seventy six percent of Yahoo leagues. You gotta add him this week. Sell Deshaun Watson. So look I like Deshaun Watson as a fantasy asset entering the season, I thought he was a value in drafts because the upside was there. I'm chasing upside. That's the way that I play fantasy football. That's the way that I analyze fantasy football. But it's very clear just by watching Deshaun Watson that he's not gonna be the Deshaun Watson of old. The chance of that happening seems very slim. On the season, Watson's twenty second and completion rate over expected, He's twenty fifth and expected points added per dropback. Now. He walked away from Week three looking okay, but he also faced the Titans defense. It's a known pass funnel defense. Entering the week Tennessee was dead last in air yards per attempt allowed, twenty fourth in total touchdowns allowed, and twenty sixth and passing expected points added per drop back allowed. In Week four, Cleveland gets Baltimore, divisional opponent, then it's their bye week in week five, and then they get San Francisco after that bye week. That's a tough stretch. So coming off a nice outing and with two QB one performances to start the season, Watson's a nice cell high add Josh downs, So I do want to say, if Tank Dell's out there on your waiver wire, you should be grabbing him. I'm not talking about him on today's show because I talked about him last week. Instead, let's talk about another rookie in Josh Downs. Downs was something that my prospect model liked quite a bit. He fell further in the NFL draft than most thought, and that gave him a strong draft capital delta. That's a metric that I created to show how my model viewed a player versus how the NFL drafted where he was actually drafted. Downs is a slot guy. He played sixty seven percent of his snaps from that area of the field against Baltimore in Week three. He ended up leading the Colts with twelve targets. His target share is over the first three weeks of this season seventeen point nine percent, sixteen point one percent, and twenty eight point six percent. That's impressive for a rookie. Now. Alec Pierce is also another wide out on that team. We know that Michael Pittman's the number one, but Downs has outperformed him to start the year. Pierce has run sixteen more routes, but Downs has nine more receptions in forty eight more yards. Now. I do think the Colts are still going to be a fairly run heavy team with Anthony Richardson, but Downs's role could grow into something bigger. So at the very least he should be on your radar. By Christian Watson. Some of you are probably struggling to get a win right now. You need some sort of change within your lineup. You might need someone like Christian Watson. Not only is Watson a very high variance player, he looks like he could be a stud, but he also looks like he might be the next Chase Claypole. So not only does he have that variance, but he still hasn't played a regular season snap this year. Fortunately, it does sound like he's close to returning to the field after dealing with his hamstring. He was practicing last week and that's exciting news because Jordan Love without Christian Watson, is third in the NFL in air yards, and Watson's coming off that rookie season where he had a yards per route run rate above two point twenty five. The reason that's important is because since twenty eleven, the only first year wide receivers to hit that mark have been Odell Beckham, Jamar Chase, Justin Jefferson, AJ Brown, Tyreek Hill, and Chris Olave. That's unbelievable company To be part of targeting and training for Christian Watson right now is absolutely risky, but his manager might be sick of dealing with this injury. He might be the boost that your team needs. Add CJ. Stroud. C J. Stroud has been awesome to start the year, even in fantasy football. He had a rough Week one, but he's had back to back twenty point performances. He ranks in the top half of the league in EPA per dropback, and Houston looked really competent against Jacksonville in Week three. Now, over their next two games, they get the Steelers and the Falcons. Those aren't necessarily ideal matchups. Pittsburgh might have an easy time against this Texans offensive line, and the Falcons have actually been okay and adjusted fantasy points allowed to quarterbacks this year, even if they're not perfect opponents, though, Stroud could have some long term upside, So if you're a quarterback needy team, you can add Stroud this week and he still makes for a decent enough streamer. Add the Denver Broncos defense. The Denver defense has been one of the bigger disappointments in football this year. Their Week three performance was horrific and they've scored a combine five standard fantasy points to start the year. But guess what in Week four they get The Bears. Defenses against Chicago have ranked in the top five and weekly scoring every single week this season. I know it's not an easy play because the Broncos have not played well defensively, but this is exactly what defensive streaming is all about. That's it for today's show, though, thanks to all of you for listening. If you yet subscribe to the Late Round Fantasy Football podcast, make sure you are by searching for it pretty much anywhere podcasts can be found it don't follow me on Twitter at Late Round QB. Thanks for listening to everyone. I'll talk to you tomorrow with the weekly ten trend Show.